Arena--Contract manufacturer's perspective
Updated March 04, 2020

Arena--Contract manufacturer's perspective

Brendon McGovern | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Arena

As a contract manufacturer, we have a seat on our customer's Arena account. This provides our company access to their PLM in order to process changes and review their BOMs, DWGs, and files, so we can manage their production needs. Arena is used by various departments at my company, including program management, manufacturing engineering, design engineering, and quality engineering. Arena addresses the regulatory requirements of change control for medical devices.

Pros

  • I love being able to review a redlined version of a BOM. It allows us to easily digest what has changed on a customer's BOM without having to ask them too many questions.
  • Having the thumbnail of associated files next to part numbers makes it easy to navigate and download files.
  • I like the email alerts for downloaded files.

Cons

  • I find the search function a little annoying.
  • I wish the search would provide suggested or related results based on your search.
  • Definitely has an impact on product quality
  • Arena has been significantly helpful in transfer of new products from our customer to us for production.
  • Vendor Reputation
This doesn't match exactly. But my company does not actually purchase Arena. We have a seat on our customer's account--we are their contract manufacturer.
We did not implement Arena company-wide at my company. Generally, we hold a quick training session when a new team member is brought onto a project that utilizes Arena. The learning curve is generally pretty flat to get people acquainted with the basics functions we utilize within Arena.
I have had limited experience, in terms of the QMS portions of Arena, so it is hard for me to compare the two.
Omnify, Epicor ERP, Citrix Gateway (formerly NetScaler Unified Gateway), BarTender, SOLIDWORKS, Zoom
I only have experience with fields/utilization based on the functions of Arena that our customer uses, but I think Arena is a powerful PLM tool.

Comments

  • Alaine Portnoy | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Thank you for sharing your experience using Arena as a Contract Manufacturer and the benefits of being able to participate in your customer's change process. We appreciate your review!

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